Your custom Amazon Alexa skills are now shareable via Blueprints

You might want to let Alexa help celebrate Father’s Day this year. Amazon on Wednesday said that you can now use Alexa Skill Blueprints to share personalized skills and responses via email, text, WhatsApp and social media platforms. Skills, essentially apps for Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant, are used to do things like stream music or control smart appliances. Anyone can use Blueprints to create their own personal skills in minutes. The Blueprints tool, launched back in April, provides templates that are as easy as filling in the blanks. For example, you can customize Alexa’s response to “Alexa, who is the best dad of all times?” Previously, custom skills were locked to Echo devices linked to your Amazon account, but now you can ship them on over to pop’s smart speaker for Father’s Day. He’ll receive an email, text, or notification from his social media account with a personal message from you, the skill creator. The link in the message will take him to a detail page in Skill Blueprints where he can read about it and choose to enable it for his own account by selecting the Enable Skill button, Amazon said. With rivals like Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant, Amazon is making frequent improvements on Alexa, including recommending skills best suited to the individual user.